You can't make this shit up!

Like most of us Cuban-American blogueros I get Google news alerts all the time for certain keywords. Most of the articles are crap propaganda from the official "news" organs of the castro dictatorship, so I usually don't even bother opening the emails. Today I did open one of them and I swear to god I laughed my ass off when I read this piece that can be found here. WARNING, it's one of those very propaganda sites operated by the tyrant and his sycophants.

Fidel Castro: A Modern Spartacus
By Carlo Frabetti

The same thread of reflections that compelled me write two other articles about Cuba (The Socialization of Heroism and New People) brought to mind my favorite film sequence, after having seen it many years ago. That sequence was in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and shows how, after the defeat of the slaves by Crassus’ legions, the winners ordered the losers to turn over their chief. “I am Spartacus,” repeated the prisoners one by one until their voices rose to a clamor. They did this not only to save their leader from the cross that Rome had reserved for him, but because each one of them identified with Spartacus. They had grown conscious that their feat was a collective achievement, they had socialized heroism, they had united under the slogan of “one for all, and all for one,” anticipating Communism by 2000 years. They did not have anything to lose but their chains. They had become class-conscious.

Ok, look even if you believe in liberalism, even if you believe in socialism you have to find this attempt to justify communism ridiculous. I mean it makes me wonder how anybody can believe any of the bullshit these people offer.

Searching in Google one can find 45 million references to Albert Einstein. He is literally more famous than God (whose entries do not total 10 million).

Actually, when I did this exercise, I found 550 million results for God and 37.3 million Albert Einstein. Perhaps the censored Internet access that Mr. Frabetti has is different than the free kind I have.

Einstein formulated the theory of relativity and laid the foundation of quantum mechanics. As someone rightly said, “he outdid Newton by far.” He was able to integrate the previous physics into a new and powerful paradigm, and so he is currently considered the father of modern physics.

What would have happened if he had died when he was a child, or if, instead of spending several years mentally pursuing a ray of light, he had given priority to his love of music? Nothing; absolutely nothing.

Had Einstein not formulated the theory of relativity in 1905, Poincare or any other of the outstanding physicists or mathematicians that were working on the same problem would have done it in 1906. With or without Einstein current physics would be the same (in fact, quantum mechanics had to proceed without him, as he never accepted it thoroughly, despite having been one of its founders).

Newton's apple fell when it was ripe, and if he had not been there to pick it, any other person would have done it later.

Similarly, traditional physics gave way to (or rather integrated into) a wider system when science reached the proper degree of development, and if Einstein had not been there to outdo Newton, someone else would have done it.

Keeping the proper distance between physics and politics, I think that Fidel Castro's case is very similar. What would have happened if he had died or retired 10, 20 or 30 years ago?

Simple, 11 million people would be free today.

Nothing beyond repair. If he were indispensable, he would be useless. I may sound like a paradox or a word game. If the triumph of a revolution depended on extraordinary, exceptional, unique people, it would be a random event and its continuity would be quite uncertain.

If a revolution triumphed in Cuba, it was due to the opposite: thousands of Cuban men and women could have done the same thing that Fidel did; because a whole nation bet on Socialism and shouldered the responsibility to carry on with it under the most adverse circumstances.

Sorry Charlie, I have to disagree. There are only so many people in the world, in the history of the world as calculating, as fundamentally dishonest, as despicably cruel as the tyrant, fidel castro ruz.

Einstein is not really the father of modern physics; rather, he is its most gifted son, its firstborn, and his birth into the scientific world represented a qualitative and dialectical transformation.

Einstein outdid Newton, quantum mechanics outdid Einstein and it went ahead without him as an individual but with his contributions fully integrated into its process.

And the same could be said about Fidel. Cuba gave birth to him, Cuba has been transformed with him (and with many other men and women like him); Cuba outdid him. It can proceed without him, and it will surely do it. Cuba can continue without him as an individual, but he will always be part of the revolutionary process.

Keep telling yourself that. Keep believing that, in spite of the evidence that shows that communism has never worked anywhere it's ever been implemented.

Is it appropriate that he remains at his post at the age of 80? I do not know, but that is not the matter. The fact is that he is not indispensable.

He's clearly dispensable. Once he is dispensed with a country can be reborn.

Perhaps, some think that, “his daily commitment to government responsibilities may not be indispensable, but Fidel is more than his concrete political activity: he is a living symbol, the face of the revolution.”

The face of despotic totalitarian regime that doesn't even recognize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Yes, and so what? Symbols and icons may be quite useful at a give moment, but they are not indispensable, especially, in a society that has started to move beyond (and must go on moving) magical thinking and religious alienation, society that has replaced myths with reason and metaphysics with dialectics.

Huh?

Not in vain have communists always criticized personality cult as a manifestation of bourgeois individualism and as a surreptitious form of religiousness. It is not by chance that Marx —who was aware that a revolution is a process that goes beyond doctrines and nomenclatures— said, “I am not Marxist." I don’t know if Fidel has expressed a similar idea, that he is not a “Castroist.”

Oh yeah there's no cult of personality in Cuba. What are "Vamos Bien" and all those pictures of Che about then?

Fidel, while unique, is not indispensable. He is as necessary as many other men and women like him, and he can be replaced. In fact, he has already been replaced with an entire people.

In the face of a new empire that is attempting to conquer a new Numancia and hopes that the Comandante’s death will mark the end of the Cuban Revolution, thousand and millions of Cubans proclaim with their daily heroism, “I am Fidel.”

Yeah, I don't see it pal. I see people getting on rafts daily with the hope of someday saying, "I am free of fidel!"